The explosive growth of digital communications technology has resulted in an ever-increasing demand for bandwidth for communicating digital information, such as data, audio and/or video information. To keep pace with the increasing bandwidth demands, new or improved network components and technologies must constantly be developed to perform effectively at the ever-increasing data rates. In optical communication systems, however, the cost of deploying improved optical components becomes prohibitively expensive at such higher data rates. For example, it is estimated that the cost of deploying a 40 Gbps optical communication system would exceed the cost of existing 10 Gbps optical communication systems by a factor of ten. Meanwhile, the achievable throughput increases only by a factor of four.
Thus, much of the research in the area of optical communications has attempted to obtain higher throughput from existing optical technologies. A number of techniques have been proposed or suggested to increase spectral efficiency. Multi-level signaling, for example, has been used in many communication systems, such as 1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet, to increase spectral efficiency. The use of such multiple level transmission techniques in an optical system, however, would generally require more expensive optical components and linear lasers, in order to properly distinguish the various levels. Thus, the use of a multiple level signaling approach in optical systems is generally considered impractical. A need therefore exists for a multiple level transmission technique that can be implemented within an existing optical communication system.